I have finished my new map that has taken me weeks but the stage gets slower and slower as I unlock more doors and kill people. Is there anything I can do besides using caulk. I have used caulk everywhere. Anyone know how to fix this and what the "do not enter" texture does.

Please help, I don't want weeks of construction. Besides, you guys will be able to play it.

volrathxp

07-01-2002, 08:39 PM

Framerates are can be very misleading since they differ from vid card to vid card. Have you checked what your r_speeds are? If this is an sp map the most you should be shooting for is around 20k (i.e. 20,000). for mp it should be a lot lower. it sounds like this is an sp map. a good way to cut down on the amount on unnecessary tris being displayed on the screen at any given time is with proper hint brushing. hint brushes are great because they force a break in the portals when you compile, telling the engine to break off another leaf node. So thus, if you place them right, it can cut down considerably on tris count.

Example: You're in a long room with hallways on each side of you at the end of the room where you're at. You look down and see two hallways branching off from the other end. One to the left and one to the right. Now you can't physically see what's in those hallways and where they lead, but since there's no leaf node separating the top and the bottom of map the engine can see those triangles for those other rooms. If you put a hint brush in the middle of the room, it will make it so when you're at the top of the room you can't see the plant or table in the room all the way down the room and to the right.

That's about what I can think of

nasty130

07-01-2002, 09:43 PM

Thanks I'll try it out. Do you no what the "do not enter" texture does. I have windows in my stage, do you think that is causing the problem.

patchx

07-01-2002, 10:33 PM

have u got area portals in the doors?

its alot easier than hint brushes if ur unnucustomed to them and helps alot with framerate

-patch

nasty130

07-02-2002, 12:01 AM

I have placed area portals on the doors but I have windows in the rooms. Do I need to have area portals in the windows as well, they are transparent glass.

Where should the hint textures go or should I just leave them.

If I look towards the house, about 30000 leafs are being drawn. I think it is because of the windows.

Emon

07-02-2002, 01:33 AM

Hint brushes are good, but rarely have a very good use. In kejim_post and ctf_bespin, two levels I have well over 100 FPS in, I could not find a single hint brush in Radiant. Again, if you've got a spot for 'em, use 'em.

I'd have to say the biggest thing is overlapping brushes. Overlapping brushes are the devil. They slow your framerates and compile times.

Also, any rumors you've heard about, "Texture your whole level with caulk, then go back and texture just the individual SURFACES which you can see, it saves on framerate and compile time!" are complete BS. Any surfaces that won't be seen are culled in the BSP process anyway. It won't affect your framerate (might even slow it down) and will increase your compile times immensly.

Also, make good use of detail brushes. Structural brushes are anything like walls of a room, skyboxes (BTW, details can't seal a map either), probably beams and supports, etc. Detail brushes are exactly that, details. Like small details on a light fixture or complex terrain made with GenSurf. If you have some JK editing experiance, it's easier for me to explain and to understand. In JK, when you have tons of adjoins from sectors (like BSP portals), your framerate will suck looking through all of them at the same time and will often cause HOM. Okay, if you know that, you also probably know that making complex terrain in JK is a hell of a lot faster with 3DOs than it is with sectors, because there are no adjoins. I believe that detail brushes don't create BSP portals, that's why they are faster for such things (correct me if I'm wrong). *NOTE: Detail brush surfaces aren't automatically culled. Anything that isn't seen you should caulk yourself.

Oh, and you should also caulk behind patch meshes (curves). It should increase your framerate a bit, and will get rid of that "z-fighting", those jagged edges you often see behind uncaulked patches in 16-bit mode.

Hope that helps... I'll try and think of anything else that could increase your framerate, too.

Emon

07-02-2002, 01:34 AM

Oh, duh. I forgot that if you're level has been built all properly with hint, detail, struct brushes, caulk, etc, and you STILL get low framerates, then it's probably because you've just got too damn much detail. I wouldn't cut back on any beutiful details you've made till trying all other methods, though.

RichDiesal

07-02-2002, 03:11 AM

Originally posted by Emon
Also, any rumors you've heard about, "Texture your whole level with caulk, then go back and texture just the individual SURFACES which you can see, it saves on framerate and compile time!" are complete BS. Any surfaces that won't be seen are culled in the BSP process anyway. It won't affect your framerate (might even slow it down) and will increase your compile times immensly.

That is completely wrong.

It can never affect your framerate adversely (unless you cut up your brushes), and it might speed it up. Compile time itself will not be affected at all by caulk unless you have a light somewhere you shouldn't - in which case, your LIGHT proces will run faster.

Notice these two screenshots. The first is not caulked at all. The second is caulked properly.

Notice a difference in the triangles displayed under the boxes? Every additional triangle that the engine needs to draw is a (ableit small) hit to FPS.

Plus (and the more severe reason), if you have two uncaulked surfaces next to each other, you can cause sparklies when the player looks at the brush joint from specific angles.

It is true that occasionally you will not want to caulk unseen sides, but 99% of the time, you will.

Drakewl

07-02-2002, 03:59 AM

as for hinting, look at this thread, it should be selfexplaining
http://www.quake3world.com/ubb/Forum6/HTML/019324.html

the windows in your rooms are a real problem here, imho there is no use for area portals

if an area portal is directly hit by the vis line of the player (its the case on a transparent window) it will lose its visbreaking-functionality immediately.

you have 4 options:

1.) close the windows with real visibility blocking brushes (no entities) or "delete" them

2.) remembering bespin_streets there was a big glass window that was covered by a trigger controlled window shutter. You could build a shutter for every window. The shutter could be opened by the player via button pushing and closes automatically after some seconds. This way you could use area portals with full functionality even on windows.

3.) decrease the room detail

4.) release your map 2 years from now where people have better machines :)

patchx

07-02-2002, 07:34 PM

if the windows are causing huge amounts of your level to all be drawn at the same time regardless of areaportals in doors (which wont work 'cause of the windows) then i suggest u either

1. cut down on windows or the amount of stuff visible from them

2. use the window shutter method with an areaportal in it

i used the window shutter trick on my level to get a one way window effect so that when u were on one side it blocked vis (shutter was shut) and from the other it didnt (so u could see out it) using a trigger that the player crosses and it fixed my "window showing too much" problem

u could use it so that a window is shut unless the player is in the room that the window is looked out from

nasty130

07-03-2002, 12:04 AM

Thanks a lot everybody. I think I'll just change the texture of the windows so that they aren't transparent.

Xcom

07-03-2002, 04:40 AM

Originally posted by RichDiesal
Notice a difference in the triangles displayed under the boxes? Every additional triangle that the engine needs to draw is a (ableit small) hit to FPS.